Issue №01A reading layer for searchBy RahulOpen source · MIT
01 — LedeThe case against the blind click
Read the page before
you open the tab.
Search is full of dead ends — pages that promise an answer and deliver an ad. Arcks intercepts the hover, fetches the target through a Cloudflare Worker, and renders a three-bullet summary in the time it takes you to decide. The web stays open. The friction goes away.
A hover that returns slower than a click isn't a preview, it's a delay. The worker streams, the extension paints incrementally, and the median round trip stays under 350ms.
P / 02Memory
Two caches, no history.
A 30-minute KV cache on the worker and a 10-minute in-memory cache in the extension. Identical hovers cost zero. Nothing about your browsing is persisted past these windows.
P / 03Privacy
No account. No log.
Arcks does not require sign-in, does not retain your queries, and does not log URL→summary pairs. The worker fetches anonymously and forgets.
P / 04Provider
Bring your own model.
Default is Gemini 2.5 Flash. Swap to any OpenRouter model in the options. The summary prompt is portable; the cost stays yours.
P / 05Surface
Three bullets is the answer.
Every card returns a headline plus three structured bullets. Not a paragraph, not a teaser. The card is the answer, not the bait.
P / 06Source
Open, hackable, yours.
MIT-licensed extension and worker. Fork the repo, point it at your own Cloudflare account, change the model. The defaults are good. The defaults are also optional.
Section №02Mechanism
From hover to summary, in three deliberate steps.
— Architecture, in plain English
Step 01
A 350ms hover commits — anything faster is a flyover.
A content script watches Google's result list and debounces every hover. When the timer fires, Arcks captures the destination URL and dispatches a single message to the background service worker. Nothing leaves the browser yet.
Step 02
A Cloudflare Worker fetches, strips, and summarizes.
The worker pulls the target page server-side, dodging CORS and client-side scraping. The body is stripped to readable text and sent to gemini-2.5-flash with a structured-output schema. KV checks happen before the model is even pinged.
Step 03
A card paints next to the link, three bullets deep.
The response — headline, three bullets, source host — is rendered inline as a positioned card. The extension also stamps a share button, a latency badge, and a fallback for paywalled or empty pages. The next identical hover costs zero.
Section №03Specimen
The anatomy of a single preview.
— Read like a typographic plate
SubjectHover preview, card variantGenerated bygemini-2.5-flashRound-trip348 ms · cold startCache stateKV miss → writeSchemaheadline + bullets[3]Pulled fromlinear.app/features
SPECIMEN №01348 ms
linear.app › features
Modern project management for fast-moving engineering teams.
01Built for speed — real-time sync, keyboard-first navigation, sub-100ms transitions across boards and views.
02Aimed at early-stage startups and product engineering teams shipping continuously.
03Free for small teams, paid plans from $8 / user / month with unlimited issues.
